The Day She Stopped Accepting Pieces
Kenya gave somebody everything while he handed out fragments of himself to whoever was standing there. At 54, in Richmond, she has kept every promise she made herself since.
She remembers the day she saw it plainly.
"The day I realized I was giving my all to someone that was giving pieces of himself to a lot of people," she says. She knew she did not deserve it. She did not stay and negotiate. She left.
"I have been making myself happy ever since that day."
Kenya is 54 and lives in Richmond, Virginia. She describes herself in five words. Quiet, creative, dependable, loyal, forward. She credits the zodiac for the list. She is a Scorpio in every aspect, she says, and those words partly describe one.
The rumor and the reality
The thing people get wrong about her is not subtle, and she does not dance around correcting it.
"People think I'm a player and I stay in the streets, but I am far from that," she says. "I am definitely a stay at home type of person and I refuse to be a run through."
The actual version of her week is disciplined. She trains in the gym five times a week and does yoga at home. Facials and ice baths daily. She meditates. That is her self love routine, and there is nothing decorative about it. It is maintenance, done on schedule, by a woman who has decided she is worth the upkeep.
When people ask about her relationship status, which they do, she has a short answer ready. She tells them to mind their business. It will happen when the time is right.
What single taught her
Being on her own did two things at once.
"I learned that I don't necessarily need to be in a relationship," she says. Being single taught her to love herself, and it taught her how to allow herself to be loved when the time comes. Those are two separate skills and she names them separately, which most people do not.
The boundary she had to learn the hard way is five words long. She trusted the wrong person.
The lesson she took out of what came before is practical. Ask questions. Express what you feel. Say out loud how much communication matters, and keep saying it.
"I have never really been able to depend on anybody but myself even when I was married."
What love would have to look like
Love, in this season, means having somebody she can depend on, and being somebody who can be depended on back.
Read her other answers again with that sentence in hand and they change shape. The independence is not a preference she picked up along the way. It is what she was left with. The gym schedule, the ice baths, the meditation, the refusal to be a run through, all of it belongs to a woman who has never yet had the experience of leaning on someone and finding them there.
She is honest about what that costs. Loneliness visits, she says, and sometimes it brings a low feeling with it. She does not pretend otherwise and she does not stay in it. She does the things that make her happy until it passes.
Still open
What she would say to her younger self is about the first time love showed up, and letting it in when it did.
What she wants somebody to take from her story if they read it on their worst day is three words. You are enough.
Given a chance to ask her own question, she asked this one: Do you think you can be truly happy alone?
She left it standing. What she said instead, at the very end of everything, was this.
"I plan to continue to have hope that one day he will find me."
A woman who spent a marriage depending on nobody but herself is still leaving the door unlocked. That is not naivety. After what she has already survived and rebuilt, it is the bravest thing on the page.